While conducting the interview below with Bednarek-Michalska three things struck me as noteworthy about the current state of Open Access (OA) in Poland.

First, Bednarek-Michalska reports that access to research information in
Poland is “not bad”. In light of Harvard University’s 2012 Memorandum
arguing that subscription-based scholarly publishing is now “fiscally
unsustainable” this is striking. Harvard is the world’s wealthiest university.
If Harvard is struggling, why are Polish universities not struggling too?

Of course, Harvard is a private university, and so has to fund its own
information needs. In Poland, by contrast, most subscriptions to international
journals are paid for (or at least subsidised) by the Polish government — by
means of national licensing schemes, or Big
Deals.

So if the traditional subscription-based system is providing reasonable
access to research in Poland why are Polish researchers being asked to embrace
OA?

Because, says Bednarek-Michalska, it would be foolish to assume that the
Polish government will continue to pay the increasingly expensive toll charges that
subscription publishers demand. Moreover, she adds, the large electronic
journal bundles that commercial publishers offer do not generally include titles
published by transition and developing countries. Consequently, she says, it is
vital that the research community builds its own open resources. (In fact, the
information needs of Polish researchers are already being supplemented by open
resources).

In addition, adds Bednarek-Michalska, there are unselfish reasons why the
research community should aim to make OA the norm — not least because institutions
in the developing world can generally afford to buy access to only a handful of
international journals. As a result, their researchers are being deprived of the
essential raw material they need in order to contribute to the research
endeavour. In short, the developing world has a great deal to contribute, but
for so long as it is excluded from much of the global exchange of scientific knowledge it will
struggle to play its part effectively.

Not a source of
revenue

The second thing to strike me in talking to Bednarek-Michalska was that,
unlike most journals published in Western Europe and North America, Polish
journals are not viewed as a source of revenue. Indeed, since it is assumed
that the role of scholarly journals is to disseminate research, rather than
make money, they tend to be subsidised. For this reason, no doubt, many Polish
journals are produced not by commercial publishers, but by the organisations
that generate the research in the first place — universities and institutes.

The appeal of OA for Polish research institutions, therefore, is not
just that it can the increase the visibility of their research output, but (thanks
to the frictionless nature of the digital network) it can reduce costs too.

As Bednarek-Michalska explains, “[T]he costs associated with
distributing titles (to both Polish and foreign libraries) are huge. As such
they represent a significant financial burden for universities, and everyone is
looking to reduce this expenditure today.”

She adds that OA encompasses two intertwined issues. “Open access has to
be understood as an issue of cost (without charge) as well as an issue of accessibility.
If you have a printed version of a journal sitting on the shelf in
the library but researchers can only use it in the reading room, accessibility is
low. Open access means that journals can be digitised and placed on the open
Internet.”

One consequence of the Polish approach is that home-grown publisher Versita
(acquired
by De Gruyter last year) has introduced an OA model that it calls “publisher
pays”. Here publication costs are met by the university or institute
that produces the journal, not by its authors (or their funders). When learning
this it occurred to me that, in light of the increasingly controversial nature
of article-processing charges,
this approach — were it to be widely adopted — would make Gold OA far more
palatable to the research community (Although whether, if commercial
publishers were involved, the cost of distributing research in this way would prove any more
sustainable than the subscription system might be doubted).

However, Polish OA
advocates are not overly taxed with this issue today. As Bednarek-Michalska explains, right now Green OA has a good deal
more traction than Gold OA, and Polish universities are busy setting up institutional repositories to facilitate it. Partly for this reason, perhaps, the highly
controversialRCUK
OA policy — which expects researchers to “prefer” Gold OA — has
attracted little attention in the country.

By contrast, developments in both the EU and the US — including the OA
requirements of Horizon 2020, the successful NIH Public Access Policy,
the recent White
House Memo on Public Access, and the proposed US legislation known
as the Fair Access to Science & Technology Research Act (FASTR)
— are being watched closely, and have encouraged the Polish government and its
ministries to take an interest in OA. (We could note that OA efforts
in the US are primarily focused on Green OA, not Gold OA, and the EU, unlike
the UK, has expressed no preference.)

Broader movement for openness

Third, it would appear that activists in Poland tend to view OA as just
one component of a much broader movement for openness. This is perhaps because they
became interested in the topic at a later stage than those in the West (where
OA has been an issue for some twenty years now).
As a result, they entered the debate at a point where a number of different open
movements were beginning to coalesce.

This broader approach is reflected in a new draft bill called the “Act
on Open Public Resources”. If the bill were to become a reality it would apply
to all publicly-funded scientific, educational and cultural resources. That is,
it would cover not just scholarly papers and scientific data, but (where they were publicly-funded, or produced by a public institution) “maps and
plans, photographs, films and microfilms, audio and video recordings, opinions,
analysis, reports and other works and subject-matterof related rights in the meaning of the law of 1994 on
copyright and related rights, as well as databases in the meaning of the law of
2001 on the legal protection of databases.” (As translated by Tomasz
Targosz of Jagiellonian
University).

This suggests that if the proposed bill were enacted, Poland could find itself
taking a leadership role. As Targosz
points out, while as it is currently conceived the proposed Act can expect to
face significant difficulties, it does nevertheless take a novel approach. For
this reason, he suggests, it would benefit everyone if the experience of the
wider movement could be brought to bear on the bill. “As the Polish attempt
seems to be one of the first of its kind, certainly in the EU, insight from
other countries could perhaps help to make it better and consequently to have a
model law for the rest,” he says.

Unfortunately, the bill appears to have attracted little or no attention
outside Poland, certainly in the West.

Read on to discover more about the current state of OA in Poland.

The interview begins
…

RP: Can you give me a sense of how large the Polish research budget is, how
Poland’s spending on research compares with other countries, and what
proportion of the papers published globally each year are produced by Polish
researchers. (For purposes of comparison, I understand that the UK produces around 6% of the world’s research papers, and currently spends £4.6 billion a year on
publicly-funded research)?

B B-M:Part of
the answer to this question can be found by referring to the Scimago service.
This shows that between 1996 and 2011 Poland published 304,003 papers. This is
1.24% of the world’s research papers (the UK figure is 6.23%). Using Scimago, Poland’s
research output can be compared with other countries, and more detailed
information about science in Poland can be accessed here.

As
concerns, science funding, in 2011 Poland spent 6.3 billion PLN (Polish złoty),
which is €1.5 billion [£1.3 billion]. The Polish government plans to spend a
little more on research each year.

RP: Can you say how many peer-reviewed journals are published in Poland,
and to what extent Polish researchers tend to publish in international journals
rather than local Polish journals?

B B-M: We
publish around 2,200 scientific peer-reviewed journals in Poland. As
to where researchers publish, some of our papers are published in English-language
journals, but most are published in Polish ones. In Poland, as a general rule,
scientists prefer to publish in international journals, while humanists prefer
to publish in Polish journals.

RP: To what extent is access to research a problem in Poland today?

B B-M:In terms of access to knowledge resources, I
would say that it is not bad at the moment in Poland. This is mainly because
the Polish Ministry of Science
buys a government package, which costs about 160 million PLN (£22 million) and provides
all Polish universities with access to some paid-for databases.

B B-M: It is a combination. The Polish Ministry
of Science funds access to the content of major scientific publishers for all
academic and non-commercial research institutions in Poland. The national
license agreements with Springer, Elsevier, Wiley, Thomson, as well as the
publishers of Science and Nature are coordinated by ICM University
of Warsaw, which also hosts the perpetual local archive of the licensed content
for Poland.

Access to other publishers’
resources is organised by academic consortia with partial funding provided by
the Ministry. Consortia licences only provide access to those institutions that
are willing to pay for access. Not all will want to or be able to.

Individual academic libraries also buy access to other
databases for their researchers, although they do not buy many as they are
expensive. In addition, scientists themselves will use personal contacts to
obtain papers. They will also use open resources, which are actively promoted
by libraries.

RP: What would you say to someone
who responded that if access to research is not bad in Poland today, why should
researchers embrace OA?

B B-M: Because the commercial packages
that we buy do not have everything that our researchers need. For instance, they
have no Polish scientific material, and they do not include material from other
countries whose research we need to access — e.g. research from Bulgaria and
Russia. So we need to work together to build open resources, and we need as
many of these as possible.

In addition, of course, it would be foolish to assume that Poland will always
have the necessary funds to buy access to commercial article databases. We also
need to take an unselfish view, and be mindful of the needs of those researchers
who work in countries whose research institutions cannot generally afford the
increasingly expensive offerings of commercial publishers.

No national
solutions

RP: How would you characterise the current situation in Poland so far as
open access is concerned?

B B-M: Thesituation in Poland is pretty good so
far as the promotion of open access is concerned. There are quite a few OA
events, for instance, and currently we are in the process of creating a Polish
OA calendar to catalogue them.

However, we have no national solutions today, either collective
initiatives organised by Polish universities, or initiatives overseen by our
research foundations. Likewise, no national solution has been put in place by
the Polish Ministry of Science and
Higher Education.

But if you were to rank Poland alongside other
countries in Europe in terms of the concrete steps taken by individual colleges
or foundations, we would probably be in the middle somewhere.

One positive development is that we are seeing the
emergence of a growing number of activists and social groups. I anticipate,
therefore, that things will move forward slowly but persistently.

While some of them support OA, none has an official OA
policy today. We in KOED have had discussions about open access with the presidentsof these centres, but although theyare open
todebate, they anticipate a lot
of political and bureaucraticobstacles
to introducing an OA policy.

RP:ROARMAP lists three OA mandates in Poland, and
OpenDOAR lists 75 repositories. I am not sure
how up to date these figures are, or how many research institutions there are
in Poland, but assuming the figures are correct how satisfied are you with
progress to date?

B B-M:Yes, there are 75 Polish repositories in DOAR. Many of
them are digital libraries that also contain current scientific journals and materials.
I should point out that the situation in Poland is somewhat specific: when we
began building digital content in 2004 we used the Polish software dLibra, which was not designed specifically
for scientific information but for any digital object.

At that time we were not aware of
dedicated repository software solutions like Fedora and DSpace, and we didn’t understand how
important it is for universities to have their own repositories.

As a consequence, for instance, when
they were deposited documents were not initially differentiated in any way. Today,
however, we do differentiate. For example, we make a distinction between older documents
that need to be digitized and documents that are born-digital.

I would think it fair to say that at
the moment the situation is very dynamic so far as OA in Poland is concerned.
The good news is that something changed within the Polish scientific community
last year. Many researchers now understand that repositories can promote the
research output of their university, and therefore of their own work. And they realise
that this can increase the number of citations that their papers attract, and thus
the impact of their work. This is probably because they have now had sufficient
experience of using the Internet to see the benefits of increasing the
visibility of their research by making it freely available.

But as I noted, there has been no
progress with regard to OA policies and mandates. In
Poland no one wants to force scientists to make their work openly available, so
the focus is on voluntarism. Rather than work on
developing a university policy it is felt better to let librarians develop and
manage the institutional repository and allow faculty to get used to it. Trying
to do it the other way round does not work. Perhaps Poles first need to be
shown what is possible, and become acclimatised to new ways of distributing
their research over time.

Green or Gold?

RP:Would you say that there is currently greater interest
in Gold
OA (OA journals) or Green OA (repositories)
in Poland?

B B-M: I would say that Green OA is much
more popular. It is easier to create institutional repositories in Poland, and
new repositories are therefore being built, and will continue to be built in
the near future.

In my opinion this is a realistic approach.
We librarians are successfully convincing scientists
that repositories are necessary, and we are doing so by arguing that most material
is now born digital, and so must be archived somewhere.

When I talk about repositories, for
instance, I do so mainly in the context of long-term archiving. Even though
they are coming to appreciate the advantages of the increased visibility that
OA provides, for some reason scientists understand the argument better when it
is framed in terms of the need to store research, rather than on the need to
disseminate it.

At the same time, however, we are
working with scientific institutions to transform traditional paper journals
into electronic OA journals. The Polish Academy of Science is currently active
in this area, for instance, as are some universities — e.g. my own institution,
the Nicolaus Copernicus
University (NCU).

Specifically, the NCU Press and
Senate have decided to migrate NCU journals to the Open Journal Systems (OJS) software over the
next 2 years.

RP:Are you saying that NCU Press plans to convert its current subscription
journals to OA journals? If so, how will they be funded — through
article-processing fees or in some other way?

B B-M: Polishscientific journals(which
are generally produced by our universities) are not profitable, so all the printing costs are covered by the owner institution.

Since it is not possible to make moneyfrom the journals the open accessmodel seems entirely logical, and this is increasingly the
view taken in Poland. OA journals will, therefore,
continue to be funded by universities in the way they always have been.

RP: When you say that Polish
journals are not profitable, and that all printing costs are covered by owner
institutions, are you saying that these journals were never sold on
subscription (and so were always OA) or that there were subscription journals
that did not cover their costs? If the former, then presumably the only change
at NCU Press is that its journals will be migrated to OJS, not that they will
be made OA (since they always were OA)?

B B-M: No, they
were sold, or sent, to libraries (via a national exchange programme), but never
on a for-profit basis. The main problem in the past was that one always ended
up with a large number of unsold copies. One benefit of online OA journals is
that you don’t end up printing more copies than you can sell or send to
libraries.

Additionally,
the costs associated with distributing titles (to both Polish and foreign
libraries) are huge. As such, they represent a significant financial burden for
universities, and everyone is looking to reduce this expenditure today. Open
access has to be understood as an issue of cost (without charge), as well as an issue of
accessibility. If you have a printed version of a journal sitting on
the shelf in the library but researchers can only use it the reading room,
accessibility is low. Open access means that journals can be digitised and
placed on the open Internet.

RP:Presumably some Polish academic journals are published by commercial
publishers?

B B-M: Yes. Some
examples areTermedia, Via Medica and Versita. But Termedia and Via Medica have rich
sponsors and so can provide open access to some of their titles or articles. Versita,
which is owned by De Gruyter, also has open access policy.
And in recognition of the fact that universities fund many Polish journals, it
will negotiate agreements with scientific institutions using what it calls its
“publisher-pays”
model.

RP: Who would you say is mainly driving the development of OA in Poland
today: researchers, librarians, research funders, or the government?

B B-M: In Poland, the majority of OA initiatives
are undertaken by librarians. Librarians are also the most published on the
subject.

We have also seen the emergence of an initiative of young
researchers known as The
Citizens of Science. One of the goals of this organisation is to
promote open access.

One thing that distinguishes Poland from other European countries is the
existence of the Open Education Coalition (KOED).
This brings together a number of organizations that are working towards opening
up educational and science resources, and representatives of the coalition take
part in all the important debates about openness in Poland.

I should add that the Polish government — specifically
the Prime Minister, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, and the Ministry of Administration and Digitization
— has also recently begun to take an interest in the topic.

Aware
of the debate that took place in Europe in 2011, in 2012 the Ministry of
Science and Higher Education commissioned a report on open science. This was edited
by Marek Niezgódka, and published by ICM UW.

The open access model should beincluded in theparametric evaluation of Polish scientific institutions;

Both the NationalScience Centre andthe National Centre for Research
and Development should mandate open access for the research they fund;

Scientific journals that are funded from the public purse should be
open access;

The openness of a scientific journalshould be taken into
account when evaluating it;

All the publicly-funded programmes of the
Ministry of Science should use an open access model for the scientific
material they produce;

Doctoral theses and dissertations should
be published under an open access model;

The Ministry shoulddevelopprograms to ensure that Polish
scientistsworking abroad embrace open access.

And in line with theinternational declarationsand developed solutions for OA (including libre
OA and gratis OA) it was proposed that intellectual
property rights in papers should be regulated by means of Creative
Commons licenses.

“Proposals stated above were put in order
according to their importance. The most essential suggested changes concern the
parametric evaluation of scholarly institutions and implementation of open
mandate in Polish research funding agencies. These proposals are at the same
time the most difficult to implement, but they are also able to make
significant difference. On the other hand, modules concerning evaluation of
scholarly journals and their budget funding should be the easiest to introduce.
All of these changes should be complemented with additional actions: building
OA recommendation on Ministry level, supporting scientist and institutions in
embodying open access policy by legal, financial and infrastructural help,
providing a training system.”

To date, however, no action has been taken to provide decisive
and systemic support for Polish universities wishing to embrace open access,
and the only concrete measure the Polish Government has taken with regard to OA
is to fund
the publication of articles using Springer
Open Choice.

RP: Can you clarify the meaning of the first recommendation: “The open
access model should be included in the parametric evaluation of Polish
scientific institutions.”

B B-M: We have in Poland a system of evaluation that we call “Parametryzacja”.
This involves a survey being completed on each research institution, and on the
basis of that survey the Minister makes an assessment. This assessment then determines
how much funding the institution gets.

Act on Open Public
Resources

RP: What are the major OA initiatives in Poland right now, and what are
their objectives?

B B-M: The most interesting current initiative comes from the
Ministry of Administration and Digitization, which has proposed an “Act
on Open Public Resources.” If this succeeds our job will be made
much easier.

RP:What is the objective of the proposed Act?

B B-M: The aim is to ensure that as much material as possible
is published on the Internet, especially material resulting from public
subsidies.

If nothing else, the proposal has sparked a debate in
Poland about access to resources that have been funded with public money.

RP:It sounds much wider than open access alone.
Can you say more about the scope of the draft Act, and what specifically is
proposed?

B B-M: The Act would
define openpublic resourcesasscientific, educational and cultural resources that have been supported by public money. It
would assume that all of these resources should be open, but to different
degrees (more or less open) and over different timescales (e.g. by the use of embargos).
I should stress that this would apply only topublic
institutions and to publicly-funded material.

But as I say, the draft Act has sparked a debate, and
a very heated at that. Since the Act would include cultural material there has
been a lot of protest from those who work in the world of culture for instance.

So right now, therefore, both OA activists and
activists working in the sphere of open educational resources (OER) have their
work cut out to try and convince the various communities that the Act is a good
idea.

But
as I indicated, we are seeing more and more advocates for open science,
education and culture emerging today, especially among younger scientists. We
are also seeing the formation of working groups in various organizations to support
greater openness. This is evident not only among citizens but also in
government agencies and academic institutions, as well in foundations like the Foundation for Polish Science
and the Polish
Science Foundation.

RP:As you may know, the OA policy recently introduced by Research Councils UK
has proved very controversial, particularly its requirement that
researchers “prefer” Gold OA over Green OA. Has this controversy influenced the
debate in Poland at all?

B B-M: No, there is no great discussion
about this in Poland; we are not at that stage of the debate. We also do not
have a large national research council like RCUK able to dictate to other
institutions and impose a model of OA on them. Consequently, most discussion of
OA in Poland today is limited to the question of whether individual
institutions should build an institutional repository or convert their journals
to OA.

In time, I hope, more and more
institutions will do so, and I hope that they will copy what we at NCU are
doing. If that were to happen then the ministry would have to take notice.

I would note, however, that the deal
with Springer Open Choice suggests that the Minister prefers Gold OA. I assume,
therefore, that the focus is on continuing to publish in traditional titles
that have an Impact
Factor.

RP: Green OA of course enables
researchers to publish in subscription journals with a high impact factor but then
make their papers OA by self-archiving them (although perhaps after an embargo).
One might argue that this is a more effective way of publishing in high impact factors than paying
for Gold OA with a single publisher like Springer.

B B-M: Yes, you
are right. I did raise this issue with Minister
Elzbieta Orłowska,
the Secretary of State for the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. I
suggested that weneed todevelop OA in Poland in two directions. But
unfortunately she believesthere is onlyone form of OA — Gold OA.

RP:Another controversial aspect
of the RCUK policy is its requirement that Gold OA papers are made available
under a CC-BY licence. How would you describe the current
discussion in Poland vis-à-vis research papers being made available under more
liberal copyright licences? Or is this issue not much discussed?

B B-M: CC licences are now well known in
the Polish scientific community. We have been trying
to promote their use for five years in our scientific society — by we I mean OA
and CC activists.

To do this we have organised many
lectures, meetings, debates, and workshops, and we have published a lot on the
topic. This has even seen the largest newspaper in
Poland — Gazeta Wyborcza — enter
the debate. But what we learn from this is that current understanding
of the issues remains very low.

However, some digital libraries and
repositories have started using CC. They do so, for example, in my university —
but that is because I am based here and can explain what it means to our
faculty. You can see an example of one of the CC-licensed documents in our
repository (RUM@K) here.

By the way, while we in the Open
Education Coalition recommend the use of CC BY-SA for scientific papers, scientists
generally prefer CC BY-ND.

RP:To what extent is EU OA policy
(particularly with regard to Horizon
2020) influencing the debate on OA in Poland?

B B-M: The EU initiatives — both Horizon
2020 and the
Recommendations of 17th July 2012 — are very important because
they have given us an opportunity to open further discussions with the Ministry
of Science and Higher Education.

The Ministry knows that it is time to focus on the topic,
and it was for this reason that it commissioned the 2012 report on the
implementation of OA in Poland. As I noted earlier, this was undertaken by the ICM
UW, which is a member of the Open Education Coalition. It is very good
document, and recommended, inter alia, the use of CC licenses.

I hope that the report will speed up decision making,
but we will see. And I hope that the EU
recommendations, combined with bottom-up initiatives, will deliver some good
results in the near future.

B B-M: As with
the EU recommendations, these developments have served to make researchers and physicians more aware of open access to
science. Cleary, those who publish with PLOS now also understand the issues.

And it was initiatives like those you mention that helped to persuade the
Minister of Administration and Digitalisation (MAiC) to prepare the draft law
on open public resources. In other words, the international debate about
providing broader access to content — and not just in the field of medical
sciences — has helped to focus minds in Poland.

RP:You will doubtless be aware
that a new organisation called the Global Research Council was established last
year, and is currently working on an action plan for open access.
Is Poland involved in the GRC, and do you expect the new organisation’s
initiative to prove important for the development of OA?

B B-M: No, I have no information about any Polish
involvement in this organisation. But thank you for drawing my attention to it.

RP: Do you have specific views on the debate about open data and open science,
and the role of OA within the larger Open Science debate?

B B-M: I
believe the broader debate to be very important. I began to taken an interest
in this topic in 2011. Below are some of the lectures I prepared to explain
both open science and open data.

B B-M: I hope that this year we will see more
systemic action to support OA in Poland, and with luck our ministries will develop
some specific policies to implement it.

In the meantime, we will continue to organize training events and conferences, and
take part in Open Access Week.
We will also respond to all official documents on the topic. Our objective is
to continue to change the consciousness of Polish society about the need for open
science.

RP: Where do you think Poland should be putting its main energy today?

B B-M: I believe that Poland should move quickly to
implement the EU Recommendations, although it would have been nice if we had
already implemented them.

The proposed Bill
on Open Public Resources could be key. If it were adopted Poland could
leapfrog many other countries in Europe, and take a leading position on OA.
However, it will inevitably be a painful and lengthy process if we are to
succeed.